Thursday, 31 March 2011
birthdays, vomit and heart failure
I'm very happy that Hubby appears to have got through the financial year-end without having a heart attack, although the day's not over (it's still only about 10am in the UK), so there's still time for a bit of a cardiac catastrophe (perhaps it would also happen whilst we're watching the school play, which would even trump Son's vomit). This time last year he was having palpitations in Disneyland Hong Kong, as I recall...
Anyway, better get a move on or Aesop's Fables will be without their star performer.
Cheerio
ps - Gary keeps skulking around and stealing grapes out of the fruit bowl. Him and his evil lupine ways - no fruit is safe from his salivating jaws. Right, better go x
Sunday, 27 March 2011
a weekend of single parenthood
Luckily it was the super dooper spring fair at school, so I had something else to do with the rest of the family. The kids had overpriced candyfloss and samosas, and I got to sit on the PTA stall and sell old books. By the time I got to the book stall, however, only the literary dregs were left, so I had to resort to the hard selling tactics (reducing everything to ten rupees - about nine pence). I'll give you a couple of examples:
How to pass your civil service exams; The benefits of urine therapy (this means drinking your own wee, by the way); Finding God in unexpected places (where? behind the sofa with the broken remote? And also, as someone pointed out, if God is supposed to be everywhere, surely nowhere should be unexpected?) and many, many more of a similar quality. At the end of the fair the unsold books were boxed up and taken back inside. I think they may get rolled out again in the summer fair - in which case I might have to buy up a few titles to spice up my bookshelves and make random visitors think I'm more interesting than I actually am.
Picture this, if you will:
Guest arrives and I scurry into the kitchen to put the kettle on. In the meantime, Guest checks out my newly souped-up bookshelves and thinks: this is the first time I've been to this house, let's have a neb and see what she's really like...oh my! She is an evangelical wee drinker with aspirations to become a civil servant. I never knew - what a dark horse indeed!
I turn up with a cup of tea and Guest looks at me in an entirely new light, as a hostess with hidden depths and interesting hobbies and a life outside of just being a cashmere-addicted army wife.
Hmmm...although this would only work were we actually to have guests over, which, let's be honest, is an extreme rarity. One couple did attempt it this weekend, but had to contend with Gary stalking the chocolate chip cookies and Twin 2 showing her pants, and having to shout over the sound of the generator, so not sure whether they will ever come back...
On Saturday night I stayed in, just in case anyone else in the family succumbed to the scary green D&V lurgy, and Hubby went out to Thamel for a goodbye get-together for a friend. None of the kids were ill and I finished off the Bombay Saphire, hurrah. Hubby then returned and hurled his guts up all night. He swears it was the mushroom carbonara, and nothing to do with the quantity of whisky imbibed.
So today he was ill in bed, and I was a single parent again, curses!
So that was my weekend - how about yours? x
Thursday, 24 March 2011
flying river
Poor old Twin 1 has D&V at the moment, and, because I've been encouraging her to drink flat Coke in order to rehydrate, her vomit is nice and black. She's been sick twice already (plus three times the other end), so I think I'm in for quite an exciting night.
Better sign off before the next projectile episode. xx
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
the eagle has landed, Danny boy, over!
field of dreams
pouf!
Monday, 21 March 2011
emergency spa
Friday, 18 March 2011
eco cookies
Thursday, 17 March 2011
radioactive rain
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
imaginary circus of torture
Tuesday, 15 March 2011
Lesley Ash and Professor Calculus
Monday, 14 March 2011
...and breathe...
busy, busy, no time for pants!
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
wednesday
Monday, 7 March 2011
another week, another tummy bug...
Saturday, 5 March 2011
cinderella
Friday, 4 March 2011
sneak preview
Here's the first page from the first draft of my novel, just for you!
It was five thirty in the morning after another sweat-drenched and sleepless night under a dirty mosquito net.
“Job’s in boss,” Corporal Gibbs shouted into her corner of the tent.
“Mmmf,” Zoë managed to grunt before rolling out of her cot and scrabbling for body armour.
Half an hour later and the lumbering six-wheeled Mastiff armoured truck juddered to a halt three kilometres up the main highway that ran past their patrol base.
They tumbled wearily out of the back and into the already searing heat of a Helmand Spring morning: herself, Corporal Gibbs, Lance Corporal Jackman and Corporal Hankin. The five-man search team were there ahead of them. The eight-man patrol who’d called in the counter IED team were crouched in firing positions across the road ahead.
The section commander, a chippy green-eyed Welsh Fusiliers corporal, was already talking to the search team Staff Sergeant, ignoring Zoë.
“Ma’am,” he finally acknowledged her presence, then immediately turned back to the Staff Sergeant.
“Thanks, Staff, I’ll take it from here,” she cut in, deliberately keeping her voice low to give herself an air of authority she never really felt. Despite her year at Sandhurst, her countless months of counter IED training, and more than two months already in Afghanistan, she still had to battle with continually being ignored.
She thought she saw the Fusilier corporal roll his eyes at Corporal Hankin, her own second-in-command, but she couldn’t be sure, and let it pass.
“Okay, corporal, explain the situation.”
He told her about the veering tyre tracks, which suggested local vehicles were deliberately avoiding a certain stretch of road.
She nodded, resisting the urge to chew her left thumbnail as she listened.
She looked beyond the roadside at the fields of dun and beige whispering towards the purple smudge of horizon.
Two and a half months ago, when she’d arrived in Helmand, these fields were red, a gash of poppies running right through the Green Zone. It was just over a month since the petals fell to earth, and three weeks since the harvest began. Until yesterday, the fields were full of Afghanis, entire families painstakingly slicing each seed pod with a razor blade and scraping off the opium resin with a spoon. The ‘jingly trucks’, lorries painted like gypsy caravans, took the opium harvest away, north up the highway. Yesterday the fields were empty.
Everyone said it would kick off once the harvest was in. Things were getting interesting, just as she was due home on mid-tour R&R.